LAWRENCE JOURNAL-WORLD
4C
?
WHAT ARE YOU
READING By Alex Garrison
Read more responses and add your thoughts at www.ljworld.com
BOOKS Story of remembrance Madeleine Albright weaves riveting tale of family’s experience during World War II By Carolyn Kellogg Los Angeles Times (MCT)
Mara Cushion, student, Lawrence “‘Living With Intensity,’ about gifted emotions.”
Sophie Tate, student, Lawrence “‘My Ántonia’ (by Willa Cather).”
Bridget Hedman, caretaker, Lawrence “‘I Remember You’ by Harriet Evans. It’s a good summer read.”
Laura Neilsen, 11th-grader, Lawrence “I just started ‘Animal Farm’ by George Orwell.”
Emma Wilson, seventh-grader, Lawrence “The ‘Mandy’ series.”
Madeleine Albright is a formidable figure. She was a member of the National Security Council and the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. When she became secretary of state in 1997, she was the first woman to hold the position. Her manner is direct, with a frankness uncommon for her level of statecraft. Nowadays she teaches at Georgetown, has a school of international studies named for her at her alma mater, Wellesley College, and writes the occasional book. In her latest, “Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948,” Albright traces her family’s history and draws a clear picture of Europe during World War II. Born in Prague in 1937, Albright was the eldest child of Joseph and Anna Korbel. Her father was press attache to the Czech delegation assigned to Belgrade, where she spent most of her first year. As tensions mounted, Madeleine and her parents returned to Prague, and then, in 1939, escaped to England. Their path, which seemed motivated by politics, had an underlying secret that Albright did not discover until her diplomatic career was under way. Raised Catholic, Albright had no idea that her parents had converted as a young couple and were, in fact, Jewish. More than 20 relatives, including her grandparents on both sides, were killed during the Holocaust. The stories of their fates form the emotional core of the book, but the threads are slim. Individually and in small family groups, they are displaced, removed, listed as passengers on trains. Frequently the stories end in blankness, with no written record or witnesses who were there until the end. When they do not, as in the case of Rudolf Deiml, the father of Albright’s cousins, the story is heartbreakingly knowable. A carpenter friend lived to explain that when Deiml got off the train from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz in 1944, he
Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCT
FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE Madeleine Albright, pictured March 30 at the fifth annual Clinton Global Initiative University Meeting at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., has written a memoir of her early life in Europe. shock. That is much later, when Benes and his colleagues have fought many well-articulated diplomatic battles to cement allegiances and secure power as the war grinds on. When Benes’ crew of expat Czechs returned to the country, ostensibly in charge, the balance of power rapidly shifted to the Communists. On the eve of a trip abroad, Jan Masaryk, then foreign minister, was found dead outside his bathroom window. His death was ruled a suicide by authorities at the time but he is thought to have been assassinated by Russian agents. That tragic end is an important part of the history of Czechoslovakia, which is the organizing force of the book: This is history told from the Czech point of view. The Theresienstadt camp, where most of Albright’s relatives were sent, is called by its Czech name, Terezin. Pearl Harbor gets a single mention, while two chapters are devoted to a small band of expat Czech soldiers, trained in England and dropped behind enemy lines to assassinate Nazi officer Reinhard Heydrich. Sometimes, the shift in perspective seems to leave the arc of the war incomplete, but it provides an interesting counter-narrative to the standard American version of World War II.
Albright is more than just a historian; she’s been a major international decisionmaker, one whose choices have been as important as those she chronicles in this book. In a few moments — too few — she brings that knowledge into the text. “The plot against Heydrich illustrated the complex choices faced by leaders and citizens alike,” Albright writes. “Benes had to weigh, on the one side, the political benefits of landing a dramatic blow and, on the other, the inevitable repercussions —the Nazis had the ability and the will to retaliate harshly.” The retaliation for the assassination was the razing of the town of Lidice, the murder of much of its population, and the order to ship Jewish civilians on trains to Terezin. Albright’s maternal grandmother, Ruzena Spiegelelova, was aboard one. There were no survivors. The “remembrance” promised in the title is scant and often disconnected from the action. Albright was a child listening for air raid sirens in England, while the men and women who fought and suffered were deep in the continent, unknown to her. More than a memoir, this is a book of facts and action, a chronicle of a war in progress from a partisan faithful to the idea of Czechoslovakian democracy.
Irving’s sexuality an influence in latest novel By Joy Tipping The Dallas Morning News
Steinem books released in e-form
told the waiting Germans he was a doctor; he was directed to the gas chambers. Too young to have known her relatives beyond the odd childhood memory, Albright pieces together what she can, with letters, family recollections and a few photographs. She embeds these fragments in a wellwrought political history of the region, told with great authority. For the first 100 pages, we get a thorough backgrounding in the cultural and political history of the region. Albright presents a coherent vision of the multilingual, blended heritage of Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, Hungarians and others that built a small country up to an industrial powerhouse and fostered a vibrant tradition in music and the arts. Then she follows the moves from World War I through the inter-war period, providing context in which the threat of Hitler’s rise to power can be seen. Over and over she writes of the considerations a small country must make when trying to forge a secure place in a world of shifting allegiances, which was Czechoslovakia’s dilemma before World War II. We see Germany’s march into Prague from the Czech point of view, as the tragic result of domestic ties unraveling, conflicted and weak national leadership, and betrayal by international powers. As the war progressed, Albright’s family was in London, where her father was part of a core group of displaced Czech expats led by former President Eduard Benes. Albright’s father, Joseph Korbel, mainly wrote and produced daily broadcasts on the BBC directed at those in Czechoslovakia resisting the Nazis. Korbel reported to Jan Masaryk, former ambassador to Britain, whose father, Thomas, was Czechoslovakia’s first president and a major uniting figure. For American readers who may not be familiar with the legacy of Thomas and Jan Masaryk, this book provides enough sweeping history and close-up detail so that Jan’s end, after the war, comes as a
DALLAS — Reviewers have made much of the connection between John NEW YORK — Gloria Irving’s National Book Steinem has joined a new Award-winning fourth revolution: the e-book novel, “The World Acrevolution. cording to Garp,” and his Three of the feminist latest (and 13th) book, “In icon’s books One Person.” Leave it to became Irving himself, though, to available in nail the key difference bedigital form tween the two: last week. “‘Garp’ is a more radical “Moving novel than ‘In One PerBeyond son’; the satire is broad, Words,” the situation extreme,” he ‘‘Revolution writes in a recent email infrom Within” terview. “‘In One Person’ Steinem and “Outrais a more realistic novel: geous Acts A young bisexual man and Everyday Rebellions” are falls in love with an older being released electronically transgender woman. The by digital publisher Open bi guy is the main characRoad Integrated Media. ter, but two transgender Steinem says in a statewomen are the heroes of ment released by Open this novel.” Road “e-books may be to Irving says that in 1978, this millennium” what Gerwhen he finished “Garp,” man printer and publisher he thought he was “done Johannes Gutenberg was to with the subject of our inthe last. tolerance for sexual differ-
ences.” But 34 years later, given the current political climate and interest in the subject of bullying, “In One Person” could hardly be more timely. Like all of Irving’s work, “In One Person” is suffused with humor, bite, raw sexuality and an overarching humanity, covering half a century of Billy’s life. Irving, 70, says that although “Billy is not me,” he is “my imagination of what I might have been if I’d acted on all my earliest impulses as a young teenager.” The author says he has “always identified with and sympathized with a wide range of sexual desires. When I was a boy, I was confusingly attracted to just about everyone; in lieu of having much in the way of actual sex — this was the ’50s — I imagined having sex all the time, with a disturbing variety of people. “I was attracted to my friends’ mothers, to girls
my own age, and — at the all-boys’ school I attended, where I was on the wrestling team — to certain older boys among my teammates. Easily twothirds of my sexual fantasies frightened me.” He was, he says, terrified of being gay. “It turned out that I liked girls, but the memory of my attractions to the ‘wrong’ people never left me,” he says. “The impulse to bisexuality was very strong; my earliest sexual experiences — more important, my earliest sexual imaginings — taught me that sexual desire is mutable.” With regard to tolerance or lack thereof, Irving notes, “I think our sympathy for others comes, in part, from our ability to remember our feelings. ... Certainly, sexual tolerance comes from being honest with ourselves about what we have imagined sexually.” The “just say no” mentality with regard to sex
is “a form of senility,” he says. “Those adults who are always telling children and young adults to abstain from doing everything — well, they must have never had a childhood or adolescence (or they’ve conveniently forgotten what they were like when they were young).” Wrestling appears in “In One Person,” as in all of Irving’s books, but in this one, it’s fairly peripheral, at least for the characters. But the sport is always a powerful force, and metaphor, for the author, who was inducted in 1992 into the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Okla. “Wrestling and writing are similar to me,” he says. “There’s a lot of repetition, a lot of attention to small details. Writing is rewriting.” Retirement? Perish the thought. “I began a new novel on Christmas Eve. Writing is as essential as exercise to me.”
Sunday, May 20, 2012
Poet’s Showcase Ignorance of the Living The glossy rich surface of a mirror weaved into a delicacy of a glass wall interprets a skimble-skamble sea gull’s cry before it plunges headfirst down the tall and narrow cliffs bordering the majestic waterfall, straight towards the polished rock piles listening and feeling the echoing wind as he dropped, wings tucked tight, not expecting anything unusual — before the wind caught him and rustled a severed glimpse of forever buried secrets into the sea gull’s beautiful and elegant feathers, pulling away just at the last second. — Zhongqi Cai, Lawrence
Write poetry? Our Poet’s Showcase features work by area poets. Submit your poetry via email with a subject line of Poet’s Showcase to danderson@ljworld.com. Include your hometown and contact information.
BEST-SELLERS Here are the best-sellers for the week ending May 12, compiled from data nationwide.
Fiction 1. “11th Hour.” James Patterson & Maxine Paetro. Little, Brown, $27.99. 2. “Bring Up the Bodies.” Hilary Mantel. Holt, $28. 3. “Deadlocked.” Charlaine Harris. Ace, $27.95. 4. “In One Person.” John Irving. Simon & Schuster, $28. 5. “The Road to Grace.” Richard Paul Evans. Simon & Schuster, $19.99. 6. “The Innocent.” David Baldacci. Grand Central, $27.99. 7. “Calico Joe.” John Grisham. Doubleday, $24.95. 8. “Home.” Toni Morrison. Knopf, $24. 9. “The Wind Through the Keyhole.” Stephen King. Scribner, $27. 10. “The Sins of the Father.” Jeffrey Archer. St. Martin’s, $27.99. 11. “The Witness.” Nora Roberts. Putnam, $27.95. 12. “Robert B. Parker’s Lullaby.” Ace Atkins. Putnam, $26.95.
Nonfiction 1. “The Passage of Power.” Robert Caro. Knopf, $35. 2. “I Am a Pole (And So Can You!).” Stephen Colbert. Grand Central, 15.99. 3. “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.” Anna Quindlen. Random House, $26. 4. “Most Talkative.” Andy Cohen. Holt, $25. 5. “Screwed!” Dick Morris & Eileen McGann. Broadside, $27.99. 6. “Bombshell.” Suzanne Somers. Crown, $26. 7. “The Pioneer Woman Cooks: Food from My Frontier.” Ree Drummond. Morrow, $29.99. 8. “This Is How.” Augusten Burroughs. St. Martin’s, $24.99. 9. “Prague Winter.” Madeleine Albright. Harper, $29.99. 10. “Killing Lincoln.” Bill O’Reilly & Martin Dugard. Holt, $28. 11. “Drift.” Rachel Maddow. Crown, $25. 12. “The Loyalty Leap.” Bryan Pearson. Portfolio, $25.95.